Swiss director Simon Jaquemet – fresh off the world premiere of “Electric Child” at Locarno – is considering an adaptation of “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” by U.S. science fiction writer Ted Chiang. His “Story of Your Life” already inspired Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival.”
“It’s very clever and complex,” Jaquemet said about the novella, published in 2010, which could serve as an inspiration for his future work. He is also thinking about a move into series, one that would take place after events shown in “Electric Child,” albeit still within the same universe.
“The story could take place after some catastrophic AI event. With series, you have more time – you can make it more complex. Some shows are even more daring than films [these days],” he stated.
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In the meantime, Jaquemet is bound to provoke heated discussions with his new film, “Electric Child.” Echoing many AI-related conversations taking place at the festival, he shows a happy couple: Sonny and Akiko (Elliott Crosset Hove and Rila Fukushima), who just welcomed their first child. Then their world collapses – their baby boy is very sick. Sonny, who’s already working with AI super-intelligence, turns to it for help.
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“I started thinking about this film a long time ago – even before ChatGPT was a thing. Then this whole thing just blew up,” Jaquemet admitted to Variety.
“It’s surprising even to me, how fast it’s advancing.”
While intrigued by the new technology – and about to participate in the art contest at Ai4, AI conference taking place in Las Vegas – he’s still “very conflicted” about it, he said.
“I got into coding and I use this stuff all the time. I love it, especially when I can use it in the artistic context, but yes – I am also worried and I am a bit pessimistic. It’s clear that AI will cost us many jobs and we aren’t quite ready for that disruption.”
In “Electric Child,” boundaries between a human and its fast-learning creation (played by Sandra Guldberg Kampp) become increasingly blurry.
“My film plays a lot with this fear of AI. It exaggerates it too, coming up with the most apocalyptic scenarios. But it’s an interesting question: How do we position ourselves in a situation like that, as humans?”
He added: “I used to play this survival video game – for a long, long time. You are mostly alone and then sometimes you meet another player. I thought it would be interesting if you could meet AI this way. The whole thing has something to do with human curiosity – we want to recognize ourselves in the machine and find out things about ourselves through interaction with an artificial brain.”
Produced by Michela Pini, Aurelius Eisenreich and Jaquemet for 8horses, “Electric Child” was co-produced by Titus Kreyenberg, Raymond van der Kaaij, Judith Lichtneckert, Bianca Balbuena and Bradley Liew for unafilm, Revolver Amsterdam, Perron X, Epicmedia Productions, SRF/SRG SSR and CH Media. Visit Films handles sales.
Jaquemet likes the idea of science fiction that “doesn’t rely too heavily on special effects,” he said. Instead, it plays with metaphysical ideas.
“This film is kind of realistic but it gradually ventures into a more unrealistic side, and that can be done on a very low budget. There is ‘Ex Machina’ and there is ‘Her’ [in terms of references] but I was also thinking about books by Stanisław Lem,” he noted.
Lem, a cult Polish writer who passed away in 2006, is still best known as the author of “Solaris,” adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky and later Steven Soderbergh, who delivered his George Clooney starrer in 2002.
“Apart from ‘Solaris,’ I read ‘Golem XIV’ [which introduced a ‘lecture’ given by a super computer] and ‘Fables for Robots.’ They are important to me, because they are exploring whether machines have feelings,” said Jaquemet.
One thing is sure – his characters certainly do, overcome with pain following the news of their newborn’s illness.
“This storyline was at the core of the film from the beginning, although many people told me it was a taboo. Without it, it would be a different film. A lot of this technology is about our dream of becoming immortal and in a way, AI could actually give us immortality – we could live on forever, in a simulation. But I am not sure if it’s that desirable.”
